GAMBIER, Ohio — The terms
sociology professor and
sheep farmer don’t easily go together in my mind, so I had to meet Howard Sacks of Kenyon
College to make sense of it.

It now makes sense but still takes some explaining.

Sacks, 63, is urban by birth — his first home was a row house in Philadelphia — and rural by
temperament.The pace of life and sense of community in Knox County, home of Kenyon, suit him.

“I just find aspects of rural life to be more fundamentally meaningful than I found other ways
of living,” he said.

It helps that his equally urban wife, Judy (she also lived in a Philadelphia row house as a
child), is of the same mind.

They arrived at Kenyon in 1975, when Mr. Sacks joined the faculty. In the 1980s, they bought a
farmhouse and 94 acres in Harrison Township. And then they bought sheep. At their peak, they were
keeping about 60 animals, which they raised for slaughter. (They’ve cut back on the flock in recent
years.)

“It must seem a little peculiar to some people,” acknowledged Mrs. Sacks, a freelance
editor.

But the couple have long since demonstrated that they weren’t just playing farmer. Their
daughter participated in 4-H, they went to sheep fairs, and they gradually developed whatever the
rural equivalent of “street cred” is.

“There was that initial suspicion,” Mr. Sacks said. “But that, over time, has changed because I
didn’t just go away.”

In fact, the couple became passionate advocates of rural sustainability — the preservation of
small-town and rural life found in a place such as Knox County.

Mr. Sacks directs Kenyon’s Rural Life Center, a program that promotes locally grown food, oral
history, academic study, arts and other activities related to rural life.In April, the center will
present Rural by Design, a weeklong series of lectures, concerts and exhibits on rural
sustainability featuring, among other speakers, an Amish bishop.

Kenyon, a pricey liberal-arts college that attracts a lot of students from New York and other
points east, is far more engaged with its rural surroundings than it was when he arrived 38 years
ago, Sacks said.

And the students benefit.

“For my students, who are primarily from urban cosmopolitan areas, engaging in this community a
quarter-mile off the campus,” he said, “has something of the same impact personally as when they go
to Thailand or China or Africa.”

Rebecca Katzman, a Kenyon junior majoring in sociology, has studied the Amish, rural attitudes
toward gun control and other topics far removed from her roots in suburban St. Louis.Her professor’s
connections in Knox County, she said, have been invaluable.